3LINEAR EQUATIONS
What number added to 7 equals 12? For thousands of years, humans have asked and answered questions like this in different ways. At first, people relied on words to describe mathematical statements. Over time, people like Diophantus in Egypt (3rd century), Brahmagupta in India (7th century), Abū al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī al-Qalaṣādī in Spain (15th century), and François Viète in France (16th and 17th centuries) developed the mathematical symbols that we now use in algebra. In this chapter, we use our modern notation to solve the most basic equations, called linear equations. (In Chapter 7, we'll see why they have this name.)
3.1 Solving One-Step Equations
Nowadays, we express a question like, “What number added to 7 equals 12?” ...
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